Culture Wars Page 16
The Guardian (21 August) reported that Baker had written to Ealing and Haringey councils asking for details of their policies on teaching children about homosexuality. In particular, a reference in the letter to Section 23 of the 1944 Education Act appeared to suggest that the councils’ policies in this area might run contrary to their duty to provide a balanced curriculum. The Express (22 August) reported Baker’s actions as ‘Clampdown on “gay” lessons’, whilst the previous day’s Telegraph wrote of ‘a deliberate attempt to molest the sexual education of children without their parents’ consent’ and called for government action.
In October, at the Conservative Party conference at Bournemouth, Baker was given a standing ovation for a speech in which he condemned the ‘bigotry and intolerance’ of Labour education authorities and stated that that the Education Bill would include an amendment removing, according to the Hornsey Journal (10 October),
control over sex education … from teachers and local authorities and given to the new-style governing bodies which have more parents on them and be answerable to an annual parents’ meeting. The Governing body will decide what, if any, sort of sex education they should offer, and whether the school should allow particular parents to withdraw their children from particular sex education lessons.
Referring to the ubiquitous press stories about Brent and Haringey, he was quoted in the Telegraph (8 October) as stating: ‘This is nothing to do with education but is bigotry masquerading as equality and intolerance masquerading as freedom’. Entirely typically, he also attempted to tar Labour at the national level with the local ‘loony’ brush by arguing that ‘this is not a tiny minority of fanatics and cranks. It is Mr. Kinnock’s supporters applying Labour education policy’. The same day’s Express gave considerable prominence to the Bournemouth debate under the headline ‘Maggie blitz on schools’ and the sub-heads ‘Left wing cranks will be curbed’ and ‘More parent control on sex education’. According to a leader in the same day’s Sun: ‘At last, Education Secretary Kenneth Baker is curbing the poisonous flow of homosexual propaganda into the schools … Sensible parent power will take over from the left-wing crackpots’.
Other ministerial speeches also developed this theme. Deputy Leader and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Norman Tebbit condemned the immorality of ‘ILEA distributing explicit books no decent parents would wish their children to see.’ Nicholas Ridley, Secretary of State for the Environment and therefore responsible for local government, ridiculed the local ‘loony left’ for creating ‘independent Socialist republics’, adding that certain local authorities ‘challenge the very basis of society, actually teaching homosexuality and lesbianism in nursery schools’.30
On 14 October the Mail devoted highly sympathetic coverage to those Tory MP’s, now numbering over 100, for whom Baker’s plans were inadequate and who were urging him to compile a mandatory blacklist of ‘corrupting’ sex books, sack any teacher who used such books, and give parents the right to withdraw children from sex education lessons. But the symbiotic relationship between such politicians and the client press was nowhere more clearly demonstrated than by events later that month. Thus, on 21 October, Peter Bruinvels cited in Parliament an article on sex education books which had been published in the Mail, 23 September. Books mentioned in the article which were name-checked by Bruinvels were Jenny, Make It Happy, The Rights of Children, The Playbook for Kids about Sex, Biology for Life, Growing Up: A Guide for Children and Parents and Talking Sex. Bruinvels’ descriptions of these books were nearly identical to those in the Mail’s annotated list, except that minor but significant tweaks made them sound even more dubious. Thus, for example, while the Mail reports that Make It Happy ‘discusses masturbation, group sex and bestiality’, Bruinvels states that it ‘encourages’ these activities, and in the Mail’s description of Sex for Beginners the book ‘professes to set out “sensible” rules for experimenting with bondage’, whereas according to Bruinvels it ‘calls for experiments in bondage’. But the echo chamber was in operation yet again the day after Bruinvels’ speech when the Mail’s sister paper, the Standard, devoted the entirety of its front page to a story headed ‘Beware this dirty dozen’, with the strap ‘MP condemns “too sexy” school books’. The article, such as it was, consisted of virtually nothing but an edited version of the annotated list of the books first published in the Mail and then partly regurgitated by Bruinvels, who, the article explains, ‘is calling on parents to write to him or Education Secretary Kenneth Baker with the names of books which they believe should not be used by teachers’.
The Express (7 November), in an article entitled ‘Rape of the innocent minds’, which comprised part of its ‘Wrecking of our schools’ series, also turned to the subject of sex education, arguing that ‘the full extent of the pollution of children’s minds can be gauged by the wide selection of sex guides and advice now available in some classrooms … Books reveal a new chapter in moral corruption’. Entirely unsurprisingly, Jenny, The Playbook for Kids about Sex, Make It Happy and Growing Up are all featured. The series had started on 25 October with an article which listed ‘the seven deadly sins’ of which Labour authorities were guilty: the first two were anti-racism and anti-sexism. Summing up the series on 21 November, the paper concluded:
We have shown how extremist Labour councils are exploiting pupils for their own warped political ends. How gay rights watchdogs and race commissars are appointed in their schools … And above all how a wide range of sex guides are recommended for schools, seemingly to undermine family life by glorifying homosexuality while not warning of its dangers.
But here Baker was able to seize the initiative from his Tory critics, concluding, in the course of a lengthy and supportive interview that illustrates all too clearly the symbiotic relationship between the Tory party and sections of the national press:
What I can do is subject these schools and local education authorities to the critical glare of publicity. But at the end of the day, it is parents who must use their power to turn out the race and sex commissars who are imposing their dictates in some of our schools. The fact that all the awful examples spotlighted by the Express are taking place in Labour authorities is the clearest illustration of what will follow nationally if a Labour Government, containing many of the same extremists, is elected and given power to control the entire education system.
From Haringey to the Lords
However, it was in the Lords that reaction to press stories about sex education in Haringey began the process that would eventually lead to the enactment of Section 28.
On 15 April 1986, Viscount Buckmaster, an independent peer but member of the Conservative Family Campaign, introduced an amendment to the Education Bill, which stated that:
It shall be the duty of each local education authority, and of the head teacher and governing body of every school, to ensure that any teaching, books, materials or other teaching aids concerned with sex and human reproduction, whether given in specific sex education lessons or elsewhere in the curriculum, shall not advocate any illegal act or act of obscenity, and any such teaching shall comply with the religious and moral beliefs of the parents of children at the school and shall be given in the context of enduring family life.
It shall be the right of every parent to be informed in advance of the content of any sex education to be given at the school, and notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (1) above it shall be the right of any parent to withdraw his child from any sex education to which that parent objects.31
He claimed that ‘a great deal of the sex education today, particularly in our maintained schools, is amoral, if not downright immoral, dealing, as it does, with human reproduction in the most provocative and explicit way, with no element of moral guidance’.32 He also raised the issue of ‘the appalling sexual crimes that are apparent nowadays, the increase in rapes, the attacks on children. Is there not perhaps some connection between these and this appalling sex education?’33 In his view:
This
Bill surely comes at a fortunate time. It comes at a time (does it not?) when discipline and self-discipline are under increasing criticism, when any restraint on acts or word is considered totally unnecessary. It comes (does it not?) at a time when moral standards are flying away like straw in the wind and the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah are rampant in the land.34
For the Government, Baroness Hooper called the amendment ‘impractical’, but also assured the House of the Government’s ‘sympathy’ for the amendment’s intention, and claimed that ‘the Government do not believe that the door is closed on this topic’.35 Thus reassured, Buckmaster withdrew the amendment.
However, he returned to the Lords on 20 May with an amendment which stated that ‘such sex education as is given in schools shall have due regard to moral considerations and the promotion of stable family life’.36 Resuming his attack on sex education, he expressed concern that:
There are certain themes which appear to be running through much of this education, and particularly in London. These are that homosexual relations are just as acceptable as heterosexual relations; that there is nothing basically wrong with under-age sex provided one takes the appropriate precaution; and that incest can on occasions be regarded as a loving relationship.
Jenny was invoked as evidence of this form of sex education, and the Viscount confidently asserted that the book was ‘issued by an authority in north London’ and ‘was designed for use by six- to eight-year olds’.37 For the Government, Baroness Hooper stated that:
I believe that many who have supported the amendment are in favour of the intention behind it, as indeed are the Government. What we have been trying to show is that the whole point of the present Bill before your Lordships is to seek to ensure that the curricular policies of individual schools will be more flexible and more responsive. The new governing bodies with substantial parent representation and accountable to the full parent body should play a major role in ensuring that schools adopt a sensitive and commonsense approach to controversial issues such as sex education. Nevertheless, in view of the feeling expressed in the House this evening I shall undertake to take back this particular issue and reconsider it before the next stage of the Bill.38
Again reassured by this indication of government policy, the Viscount withdrew his amendment.
Two days after Buckmaster’s question, Sir Hugh Rossi wrote to his constituents asking them to join him ‘in condemning Haringey Council’s proposals to promote images of homosexuals in local schools’. He stated that he had received over forty letters from parents on the subject, and, according to the Hornsey Journal (1 August), ‘vowed to raise the issue in the House of Commons’ during the final readings of the Education Bill in the autumn. Thus the matter had arrived in Parliament within a mere three months of the campaign mounted by the Tottenham Conservative Association, and within two weeks of the earliest public protest over the issue.
On 28 July 1986 the crossbencher Lord Monson asked whether the government approved of ‘Haringey Borough Council’s plans for compulsory lessons intended to promote “positive images” of homosexuality in nursery, primary and secondary schools in the borough’. For the government, the Earl of Swinton admitted that the Secretary of State for Education ‘was disturbed to see press reports of Haringey council’s plans’; he also revealed that Baker was ‘making enquiries of the authority to establish the facts’ and to discover how it proposed to pursue its policies with schools. Although admitting that ‘there have been a number of rather exaggerated press reports’, he also added that he thought Haringey’s policies ‘pretty horrific’.39 The Telegraph (29 July) duly reported the debate under the headline ‘Homosexual teaching in schools deplored’.
‘Promoting homosexuality’: Haringey and the genesis of section 28
A few months later, on 18 December, another crossbencher, the Earl of Halsbury, who had played a key role in in the 1977 campaign to defeat Lord Arran’s bill to reduce the age of consent for homosexual acts from twenty-one to eighteen, proposed the Local Government Act 1986 (Amendment) Bill, entitled ‘An Act to restrain local authorities from promoting homosexuality’. This was intended to apply to local authority activities in general, and to schools in particular, and, as finally amended, sought to prohibit ‘the teaching … of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. In his opening remarks he complained that:
We emancipated races and got inverted racism. We emancipate homosexuals and they condemn heterosexism as chauvinist sexism, male oppression and so on. They will push us off the pavement if we give them a chance. I am, in their jargon, a homophone [sic], a heterosexist exploitationist. The whole vocabulary of the loony Left is let loose in a wild confusion of Marxism, Trotskyism, anarchism and homosexual terminology.40
This set the tone for a debate which Stephen Jeffery-Poulter rightly describes as sinking to ‘new levels of intolerance’ and which ‘in terms of reactionary hysteria equalled the homosexual law reform debates in the 1950s’.41 During its course, Haringey was mentioned seventeen times, which was hardly surprising given the press furore and the extent of lobbying by the PRG of both Houses.42 The Tory peer Lord Campbell of Alloway, who had actually drafted the Bill, attacked ‘the provision of explicit books of certain types’ to children. He also translated the presentation of positive images of gays and lesbians into ‘the promotion of homosexuality as this so-called family relationship’ and condemned it as a ‘direct attack on the heterosexual family life’.43 Another Tory peer, Lord Bellwin, quoted from the Standard (10 December) about ‘a cri de coeur from a priest who has vowed “to fast from New Year’s Day unless Haringey Council reverses its policy of positive classroom images of homosexuals”’.44 Recalling a theme mentioned at the start of this chapter, Lord Fitt, the former Social Democratic and Labour Party MP who now sat as an independent socialist, announced that ‘I have absolutely no doubt that a significant number of present AIDS carriers within our society were given positive education in homosexuality when they were at school’.45 Baroness Cox complained of ‘the active promotion of positive images of homosexuality and outright attacks on the concept of the normality of heterosexuality’46 . Both she and the crossbencher, Lady Saltoun, cited a leader published, most conveniently, in that day’s Times. Headed ‘A grass roots rebellion’, this is yet another excoriation of Haringey council and paean to the allegedly much-persecuted PRG, which is represented as standing bravely against ‘malignant causes’ and ‘the extremists in charge of the local council’ who want to subject children ‘to what amounts to sexual propaganda’. As proof of such propaganda, the leader cites The Playbook for Kids about Sex, apparently available from the Lesbian and Gay Unit, which
includes an introduction of small children to homosexual relationships and could even be construed as conditioning children so that they will not object to sexual abuse. From the children’s shelves of a public library, a 15-year-old schoolgirl obtained a book which is simply homosexual pornography. And the campaign, as described by its own advocates, is designed to subject the school curriculum to homosexual proselytising.
The leader also notes that ‘most of the protesting parents are Labour voters. But they have come to believe that their own party has become a cover for the anti-democratic left which abuses the education of their children to undermine the family and democracy’. Hammering home the party political point, it recounts:
The Haringey mothers wrote to Mr Neil Kinnock but got a five-line letter from his office saying he could not intervene. They have taken the point. Today the House of Lords is debating a private member’s bill, introduced by Lord Halsbury, which would seek to forbid local authorities from giving financial aid for the promotion of homosexuality. It is of riveting interest to the mothers of Haringey.
The leader was also quoted by Lord Denning, who revealed, in a telling insight into the attitudes of the unelected to the elected:
I looked up the Book of Genesis again. ‘But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners befo
re the Lord exceedingly’. And the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. When I read the article in The Times this morning, I thought of altering those words and saying: ‘But the councillors of the Borough of Haringey were gay, and corrupted the children of the borough exceedingly’. And, I should like to add, after this Bill, ‘The Lords destroyed those councillors’.47
The only Labour peer to oppose the Bill was Lord Graham of Edmonton, head of the Association of London Authorities, which represented Labour-controlled authorities in the capital. Predicting, quite correctly, that ‘perhaps mine will be the only voice in the debate that is not in favour of giving this Bill a Second Reading’, he went on to state that:
I do not stand here with any brief either for homosexuality or for lesbianism. I fully share all the criticisms that have been made about the behaviour of some councils and councillors in pursuing what they believe to be their duty to their ratepayers and citizens.48
However, he also warned that ‘there is a great danger, if this amending Bill is passed, that it will seek to repress the honest and open discussion of these matters at a time when, in my view, they ought as never before to be discussed seriously and sensibly in our schools’.49 On the other hand, he concluded his speech in the same vein with which he had commenced it:
If anyone here with responsibility on this side of the House believes that the image of the Labour Party or of Labour in local government is aided and assisted by the performance or behaviour of some individuals or collectively in certain parts of the country, then they are not correct …. I very much hope that when we hear what the Minister has to say he will sympathise with the situation in which a great many people find themselves, but share my view that a Bill of this kind is not the way to proceed.50